Art: Forgiveness is Fabulous, But Have You Tried Bedazzling Your Trauma?

Have you ever looked at a shrine and thought, “This needs more glitter, a Barbie head, a golden bird, and maybe a dash of righteous fury”? No? Then you clearly haven’t been baptized in the incandescent, found-object fever dream that is Vanessa German’s Forgiveness is Good it Shines it Remembers and Forgets All at the Same Time it Washes the Soul Anew. That title alone deserves a standing ovation and a nap. It reads like a lost Psalm co-written by Maya Angelou and a Black southern grandma who survived four wars, five husbands, and a school board meeting.

Vanessa German, the high priestess of visual exorcism, isn’t making art for coffee table books or sterile white cubes where people whisper about brushstrokes. No, she builds power figures—fierce, bedazzled, unapologetic sentinels of Black resilience and joy—by gluing together the flotsam of America’s cultural junk drawer and breathing life into it like some post-industrial Frankenstein goddess. A Barbie torso? Put it on the crown. A brush topped with a gold bird? Boom, it’s a scepter. And pearls, buttons, keys, bottle caps, rosaries, teeth (maybe)—each piece whispers a secret from someone else’s forgotten life. German doesn’t decorate her figures. She armors them.

And why forgiveness? Because in America, particularly if you’re Black and a woman, forgiveness is a daily miracle performed in a country that keeps handing out wounds like free samples at Costco. German isn’t asking you to forgive and forget. She’s telling you to remember, glitter-bomb the pain, shout it into being, and then maybe let it go if your soul feels like it. Forgiveness, in her world, is active. It’s feral. It shines and forgets and scrubs your spirit clean with a loofah made of ancestral rage and rhinestones.

This sculpture doesn’t hang quietly on a wall; it stands, arms open like it’s ready to receive your confession—or punch you in the heart if you’re not ready to face the truth. It’s a sermon in sequins. A museum piece that looks like it might walk away if the conversation bores it.

So here’s your creative and wildly uncomfortable question of the day:

What does your forgiveness look like—and would it survive being bedazzled into a shrine, or would it flake off like cheap paint in a thunderstorm of reckoning?

#ForgiveLoudly #VenessaGerman #BlackJoyIsPower #ArtAsArmor #BedazzledReparations #MuseumMagic #SoulLaundryDay #PowerFiguresUnite #TraumaButMakeItFashion